


your last breath moving through you

by tosca1390



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2013-12-30
Packaged: 2018-01-06 17:27:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1109558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tosca1390/pseuds/tosca1390
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Jenna opens her eyes, mouth wet with blood, and breathes in.</i> It's what happens after you're dead that's eye-opening.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your last breath moving through you

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2011 FemGenFicathon. Originally posted August 2011.

*

The fire is dead, ash swirling in the cool air. Everything is cold, her muscles stiff. She does not remember how long she’s lain here. She remembers the fire, and the darkness, and a long spell of nothing. Then there was a cacophony of sound, chaos in her chest and veins, and life flexed through her once more. But now she is alone and she keeps her eyes shut. There is a stake in her chest. It drives right through to the ground, immobilizing her. The switch inside her is still off; she doesn’t understand it but she knows it’s better to have it off. 

She can hear grass under feet, the muffled sounds of footsteps. 

“Bonnie, go back to the house. You look awful. I’ll take care of all this.”

It’s Stefan, tired and ragged around the edges. 

“I can’t. Not yet,” Bonnie says, and the footsteps are coming closer. Her fingers curl into the loamy dirt, scrabbling for purchase. 

“What—Bonnie—“

“I did something. Another spell. If it worked—“

Someone kneels next to her. Her nose twitches, her sense of smell heightened. The perfume is Bonnie’s, and so is the blood-scent curling through her nose, making her mouth water. 

“Jenna’s dead, Bonnie.”

Suddenly, the stake is pulled from her chest. All the air is sucked from her lungs in a heavy exhale. She lifts off the ground in a sharp arch, her mouth searching and open. Her body shakes with hunger. Something warm and squirming is thrust into her hands and she sharpens her fangs and drinks without a second thought. Blood warm and slick and sweet slides down her throat as the hole in her chest knits back together. 

“No. She’s not dead. Not really,” Bonnie says after a moment, triumphant. 

Jenna opens her eyes, mouth wet with blood, and breathes in. 

*

“I don’t understand,” Jenna says, sitting against a tree trunk. Dawn is coming over the mountains, blue-pink and frightening. 

Bonnie walks from one corner of the clearing to another, her hands outstretched in front of her. The magic thrums through the air, cleansing the woods of the crimes committed there. Stefan is deep in the woods, burying Jules. Bonnie burned Greta herself, after allowing Jenna to feed on her once more. Something in Jenna’s stomach turns at the thought, but the switch is still off; she is still not herself. 

“What do you mean?” Bonnie asks, distracted. Her hands shake and her voice trembles, but she does not take a moment to rest. Jenna wonders when these girls, Elena and Bonnie and Caroline, had become women right under her nose. 

Then again, a lot had happened right under her nose. 

“How am I still alive? He staked me.”

Glancing at her, Bonnie stops and lowers her arms. Her face is drawn in the dimming night. “I cast a spell on Greta before Damon killed her. It’s complicated. But once we knew it was you—I wanted to do whatever I could. I didn’t think it would work, but I wanted to try.”

Jenna tucks her knees to her chest. Her head throbs, and her chest still aches from knitting back together. “Do I have an expiration date?”

“No. You’re still a vampire,” Bonnie says, walking towards her. “I just used Greta’s—“

“You know, I think I don’t want to know anymore,” Jenna says shortly, pressing her cheek to the tops of her knees. 

Everything falls quiet between them. Jenna can hear leaves rustling, smell the animals waking in the woods. Every nerve is alive with feeling, and she is grateful. 

“We should get you inside,” Bonnie says after a moment. “I’ll need to make you a talisman so you can walk in the daylight, but it will take time.”

“Inside where?” Jenna asks. 

Bonnie kneels next to her. The shadows under her eyes are drawn deeply. “For now, my house. Then…”

She trails off and Jenna curls her fingers into the fabric of her jacket, stiff with cold and dirt and blood. “Stefan will help you,” she says finally. 

Jenna isn’t so sure what that means. But she follows Bonnie back to her house, curls up in the guest bedroom with the drapes drawn snug, and sleeps. The time is blissfully blank.

*

When she wakes, it’s dusk. Mystic Falls is still and cool and quiet. She remembers nights like these from high school, stealing into the forests with Logan, and later John, leaves and dirt in her hair and a stuffy nose after a cold snap. Or she and her friends would hide behind the bleachers after football games and toke up with pleasure.

The memories come as snapshots from some other life, as if seen on television. She still has everything shut off, that proverbial switch deep inside. She wonders if she’ll be able to find it again, or if she even wants to. 

She’s hungry but she doesn’t want to go outside. Bonnie hasn’t been home, from what she can tell. Her father is on a trip, as usual. Jenna touches her chest, perfect and unmarred, and looks at herself in the bathroom mirror for a long time. The fluorescent light is cool on her skin. She seems paler somehow, her hair shinier. She wonders if it’s really like that, or if she’s taking too much stock in _Twilight_ lore. 

The front door opens and closes below her, and the floorboards creak. She slips from the bathroom and down the stairs soundlessly, and finds Stefan and Bonnie in the kitchen. Bonnie drinks from a tall clear glass of water, and Stefan leans against the counter, weight on the heels of his hands. They look tired and a little broken, and Jenna wonders again how they can be so young and yet so old. 

“Everything all right?” she asks from the doorway of the kitchen. 

Bonnie puts her water glass down with a start, but Stefan doesn’t twitch. “John is dead,” he says raggedly. 

The breath catches in Jenna’s throat. She fists her hands at her stomach. “What happened?” 

“He found a spell to save Elena. It worked, but it cost him his life,” Stefan says. 

She’s torn between relief for Elena, and an odd sort of misery at the loss of John. There were chapters left unsaid between them, and now—

“Klaus is still in the area, Jenna.”

Stefan brings her back to the dim kitchen, the smell of woods lilting on the breeze from the open windows. “Oh,” she says, for a lack of anything else. She looks at Bonnie, who doesn’t meet her eyes. “So?”

“You have to leave Mystic Falls. If he finds you, he’ll kill you.”

“The fact that you and Elena have technically lived through the sacrifice makes the magic in him weaker, we think,” Bonnie says quickly as Jenna stares at Stefan in utter surprise. “It might be a way to stop him. But we need to make sure he thinks you’re dead.”

“And have everyone else continue to think so as well,” Stefan adds heavily.

“No,” Jenna says sharply. “No. I want to help Elena. I’ve failed her in the past, and now—now I can finally be there—“

“Not now, you can’t,” Stefan says, and there’s a finality in his tone that reminds her of her parents, of pleading for an extra hour past curfew, because _Miranda_ had been able to stay out past midnight when she was Jenna’s age. 

She shuts her eyes and leans against the doorframe, hands hard at her stomach. The memories shooting back into her consciousness are unfamiliar, things she’s suppressed for years now while trying to prove everyone wrong. Now it seems she’s proved them right after all. 

*

Jenna fights with Stefan, with Bonnie, finally with Damon. In the end, it doesn’t matter. The same day they bury John and a pseudo-her in the cemetery, she is on her way to Chicago. She has cash, a necklace talisman courtesy of Bonnie, one of Stefan’s cars, and the contact information of a friend of Stefan’s who will serve as her guide as she moves into the new stage of her life. 

Before she leaves, she goes to Alaric’s apartment and finds it empty, covered in a thin film of dust. His clothes are gone, his history texts. She knows he wouldn’t leave Elena and Jeremy, not after all this. 

So then she creeps along the edge of the Gilbert home in the deep darkness of night. The house is full of light and people, the wake still in full force. Through the window she can see Elena playing hostess in the living room, her face a hard smooth façade. Damon and Stefan bracket her, twin pillars of strength. Caroline, Bonnie, Jeremy, Matt, Tyler—they all look so very old, so very beyond the townspeople milling about with their condolences and their baked goods. 

There’s no sign of Alaric. Swallowing, Jenna goes around the side of the house and climbs the tree with an easy grace to the branch closest to her bedroom window, and sure enough, he’s there.

Alaric stands with his back to her, head bowed. He is in front of her closet, the doors wide open. A bottle of whisky hangs loosely from his fingers. His shoulders shake. 

Jenna bites her lip and sits in the tree for what seems like hours, watching him in her room, in the room she thought they might have shared together once upon a time. She wants him to turn around, wants to imprint his face into her memory. 

_You can’t come back until we say so, not for years, most likely_ , Stefan had told her. 

That was a long time. Too long for Alaric to wait, or remember. 

She leaves without seeing his face. Halfway to Chicago, she finds the switch, and flips it. 

She cries for hours with just the wind and the open road to keep her company. It’s the only time she lets herself feel it all at once, a surging rush of sadness and loss. 

*

Jenna spends six months in Chicago with Jacob, Stefan’s friend from all the way back in the Roaring Twenties. They share a spacious three bedroom apartment near the lakefront, and after a month they are having sex and skimming off the top of blood bank storerooms together like they’ve done it for years. He helps her curb her urges, control the wild swing of emotions that pull at her from one moment to the next. 

She takes to the lifestyle more quickly than she anticipated, and she keeps the switch on, for her own sake. To have it off reminds her too much of death and silence, a stake through her chest; sometimes the emotions overwhelm her, but then she keeps herself busy with work as a bartender, or exploring the history of Chicago, or with Jacob.

He’s beautiful, a leftover from a pale, glittering time; blond and lean and all gentlemanly courtesy. Jenna applauds Stefan’s choice for her; Jacob is a perfect person for the transition. Still, his stubble and his eyes remind her of Alaric, and she can’t resist that pull, to check up on them all. 

She hears about Stefan’s descent with Klaus from Jacob, who hears it from Damon. From Bonnie, she hears that Alaric has moved into the house with Elena and Jeremy, as their new pseudo-guardian (unnecessary due to Elena’s coming of age, but it makes her so happy, so warm just the same); she wonders if he’s in her old bedroom, and if it smells of his cologne all the time. 

( _She has a shirt of his that she had Bonnie grab for her. She sleeps with it as a pillowcase. When she breathes deeply enough, it smells of him._ )

Apart from that news, she hears very little. The vampire crowd in Chicago keeps to itself, wanting to avoid notice from Klaus. Some days, she manages not to think of Mystic Falls, of the degree she’s never received, of the niece and nephew and the boyfriend left behind in a wake of supernatural events. 

Most days, she does, though.

*

Soon Jacob is moving on, and so must she. They part as friends and she knows she’ll see him again soon. He goes east towards Boston; she goes west, to San Francisco. Jacob has friends there, and she settles into a new group. In six months she’s seen more of the country than she did in her near-thirty years before. She soaks it in and enjoys the freedom, because it’s all new to her. 

And if she thinks of the turmoil of home, of the damage left there, she doesn’t think of it long. She _can’t_. 

*

Just like that, two years go by. Mostly, Jenna feeds from blood banks, just taking the bare minimum, or on small animals. She has never killed another human, never turned anyone. She stays in the continental United States; once, she thinks of venturing to Europe, but her fear of discovery by Klaus or the other Originals is too overwhelming. 

The vampires she befriends, through Jacob and his network, aren’t connected to Klaus, or to the mythology behind it all. They’re relatively young in terms of age, all turned within the last one hundred years, and they’re a good group to be with for now. They want to learn and explore and have fun, and she needs that; it keeps her mind from wandering too far east or south, to Virginia and deep dark forests and a circle of fire. 

In Seattle, she thinks she sees Jeremy in a coffee shop and stares for so long the boy gets up and leaves. She goes to Ann Arbor to meet up with Jacob (Michigan is one of his alma maters, and his favorite football team of them all), and the gaggles of college girls remind her of Elena and Bonnie and Caroline so strongly she needs to cry in the crummy stadium bathrooms for a few moments. In Austin, she dates a history professor at UT, and thinks of Alaric. 

She finds work in universities wherever she goes, and she likes being able to dedicate so much time to her studies. It’s selfish, she knows, but she had to devote so much time to Elena and Jeremy and keeping them together that she let her academic integrity slide after Miranda and Grayson’s deaths. It’s nice to lose herself in research and studies once more, to keep that small part of herself thriving. It doesn’t erase the guilt that gnaws at her bones when she thinks of home. 

Soon she decides that Canada is her next stop. A new country, a new climate; she wants to shake free of the memories and tugs of home, just as she tried all those years ago after high school and the failings there. 

Running didn’t help then. Now, she isn’t sure, but it’s worth a shot.

*

Eventually, it will end and they’ll tell her she can come home. 

She’s not afraid of the weakness in her to think that perhaps she might not want to go.

*


End file.
